Oriol Vinyals

At 15, Vinyals became obsessed with the real-time strategy game StarCraft and soon became the top-ranked player in Spain. He has said that he almost knew the game would return later in his life and that he was fascinated by the artificial intelligence problems it presents. He studied as an undergraduate at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.⁠[1][1][1][2]

Vinyals pursued a PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, during which he helped create Overmind, an AI bot able to play StarCraft unassisted. In fall 2013, he completed his doctoral thesis, “Beyond Deep Learning: Scalable Methods and Models for Learning,” which studied the training and simplification of deep architectures with a focus on acoustic modeling and object recognition; the chair of his thesis committee was Nelson Morgan.⁠[2][2][1][2][2][2][2][2]

Around 2013, a quick email exchange with Jeff Dean brought Vinyals to Google, where he joined the Google Brain team.⁠[3][3]

In 2014, Vinyals, Ilya Sutskever, and Quoc Le published “Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks.” The same year, while working on translation research, he changed the input from French sentences to images so that the model could generate text descriptions of photos, and published “Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator” as first author; he recalled that he changed only a single line of code, and the next day the model captioned a photo of a market “A group of people standing in the market buying fruits.” As of 2016, the technology was being incorporated into Google Image Search, and he and his colleagues had also developed Smart Reply, Gmail’s automatic reply suggestion feature.⁠[4][1][1][5][1][1][1]

In March 2015, Vinyals, Geoffrey Hinton, and Jeff Dean published “Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network,” proposing to “distill” the knowledge in an ensemble of models into a single model.⁠[6][6][6][6]

In 2016, Vinyals, aged 33 and having joined the Google DeepMind team in London, was named to MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35” list. At DeepMind, he worked on enabling computers to learn to play complex games from experience rather than through hard-coded rules.⁠[1][1][1]

On January 24, 2019, DeepMind unveiled its StarCraft II program AlphaStar: in test matches held on December 19, 2018, it beat Team Liquid professional Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz 5–0, after also beating his teammate Dario “TLO” Wünsch 5–0. Vinyals was listed first on the AlphaStar team roster.⁠[7][7][7]

On October 30, 2019, Vinyals, as first author, published “Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning” in Nature: AlphaStar was evaluated through a series of online games against human players and achieved Grandmaster level with all three StarCraft II races, Protoss, Terran, and Zerg, ranking above 99.8% of active players on Battle.net.⁠[8][9][8][8]

In February 2022, DeepMind announced that its programming AI system AlphaCode had ranked in the top 54% of competitors in 10 simulated programming contests with more than 5,000 participants. Vinyals, then a principal research scientist at DeepMind, said he had been fascinated by programming competitions his whole life and that being part of the team that built AlphaCode was “a dream come true,” but that he had not expected it to reach the average level of competitors.⁠[10][10][10]

The technical report for the Gemini multimodal models, released in December 2023, listed Jeffrey Dean and Vinyals as the Overall Technical Leads of the Gemini project, responsible for its overall technical direction.⁠[11][11][11]

On August 5, 2026, Vinyals, then vice president of research at DeepMind and one of the technical leads for Gemini, announced on X that he was saying goodbye to Google DeepMind, recalling his work on seq2seq and distillation and his co-leadership of AlphaStar and Gemini. With Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le, he co-founded Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that plans to use AI to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously to accelerate scientific research; the initial funding round was co-led by Radical VenturesRadical VenturesRadical Ventures is an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm founded by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen shortly after the 2017 launch of the Vector Institute in Toronto. It invests from incubation and seed through growth and pre-IPO stages, and its portfolio includes companies such as Cohere, Waabi, and World Labs. In 2026, it co-led the investment in Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean and others, and completed the first close of its late-stage Radical Breakouts Fund.Open the full entry and Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. Vinyals said that once the core intelligence and the discovery loop fundamentals were built, they would be able to quickly generalize to other domains; he said that in a large organization there is always a lot of inertia to overcome to make any radical change, and that the team wanted to build something different.⁠[12][3][13][13][13][12][12]

Discovery Loop: Official website: https://www.discoveryloop.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]